Happy Fourth. Now, off to fireworks. (And yes, I know I’ve posted this before. Whatever. It’s a topical Muppets post. That’s the very best I can do.)
Sarah Palin closed her confused resignation speech by quoting a famous American general:
In the words of General MacArthur said, “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”*
Of course, given the depth of Palin’s erudition—like Reagan, she’s “dumb as a fox” to those who watch her press conferences on mute—it should surprise no one that she grabbed the first patriotic-sounding quotation about “advancing” that Google returned and tacked it onto her speech.
This is what passes for knowledge among some conservatives: the ability to quote-mine the internet for something that sounds patriotic. (Google may not be making us stupid, but the same cannot be said for many of them.) Because their paragon of intellectual achievement is a woman who cannot remember what newspapers she reads every day, it is only fitting that Palin’s last words on the national stage—intended to demonstrate that the “easy path” in life paradoxically involves “plod[ding] along” by “sit[ting] down and shut[ting] up,” because everyone knows that “a quitter’s way” is one of perseverance in the face of adversity—should be a misattributed misquotation ripped from its context in a way that conservatives would, under normal circumstances, consider insulting.
In attributing the quotation to General MacArthur, she is disrespecting the life and service of the man who actually spoke something similar to those words; and in analogizing her plight to that of the men who served under the General she disrespected, she is belittling the memory of their sacrifice.
In the winter of 1950, General Oliver Prince Smith and his 1st Marine Division were ordered to march north to the Yalu River, on the border between China and Korea. The order was given by Major General Edward “Ned” Almond, an obsequious lackey with an ego to rival Patton’s who functioned as “MacArthur’s MacArthur [by taking] MacArthur’s vision of what was supposed to happen and [bringing] it directly to Korea, where he employed it, whether it fitted the Korean reality or not” (The Coldest Winter 163). Smith, called “Professor” for his deliberate manner and attention to detail, surveyed the land and determined that the Korean reality didn’t fit MacArthur and Almond’s vision at all, and though he obeyed the command to press north, he did so in a manner that befitted his nickname:
General Almond had already begun to notice that the spearhead was hardly moving at all. We were in fact just poking along—deliberately so. We pulled every trick in the book to slow down our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got more widely dispersed than we already were. At the same time we were building up our levels of supply at selected dumps along the way. (432)
When the Chinese attacked the 1st Marine Division (19,000 soldiers) with six divisions (60,000 soliders) of its own in the Chosin River Basin, Smith and his soldiers were prepared: by day, they would avoid the roads by moving south through the mountainous terrain, shelling the advancing Chinese from the high ground; by night, they would temper the bitter chill of winter by hunkering down near the dumps Smith had had the foresight to supply.
Smith had calculated the odds of a successful push north, found them wanting, and prepared for the inevitable. So when the vastly outmanned 1st Marine had to move back through the Chosin Reservoir, they were able to inflict massive casualties on the superior Chinese force, which lost 40,000 troops to the 1st Marine’s 561. When a journalist asked how Smith and his men had done so much damage while retreating, Smith replied:
Retreat, hell . . . we’re simply attacking in another direction. (470)
Palin’s hastily convened press-conference and incoherent statement are, to her mind, analogous to Smith’s carefully planned counter-offensive—or would be, if she knew Smith said it. Which means that for her, MacArthur is not a hero to be venerated, but a prop to wheeled out when it’s politically expedient to do so. She cares nothing for the man himself or those under his command. If she did, she would show her respect by doing more than a Google search and pulling the first “good” quotation she found. After all, nothing demonstrates a deep and abiding respect for the military more forcefully than the sort of stunt my freshmen pull.
So Sarah Palin flubbed the quotation and the attribution. So she appropriated the phrase of a man who fought the inane orders of blinkered bureaucrats and took what she so arrogantly dismisses as “the worthless, easy path.” He took what she calls “a quitter’s way out,” laying the groundwork for his success in the face of adversity by “keep[ing his] head down” and “plod[ding] along.” So what: Smith is the quitter. He didn’t even advance in a different direction, he merely attacked.
To go back to an analogy with which Palin is comfortable—basketball—Smith looked at the game plan, surveyed the opposing team, and ran the point in a way that would guarantee a shot at victory. He urged his men to challenge the bigger, stronger team in the lane; to take the charges, shoot the foul shots, and keep the game the close until the buzzer. Palin, however, panicked when the situation on the floor didn’t correspond to her game plan, grabbed the ball and ran crying off the court.
(x-posted.)
*That’s what
. . . Brent Bozell, of the ironically named “Media Research Center,” who refuted Oliver Stone’s comment that “Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch” by quoting a number of prominent figures in Reagan’s administration who thought Reagan was really smart:
I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989 . . . Richard Allen, Reagan’s National Security Advisor . . . [and] Gary Bauer[, the] Domestic Policy Advisor under the Gipper for two years[.]
All of them agreed that real “dumb son of a bitch” was Stone, who—according Bozell in a letter addressed to Stone—is an historian because he once claimed to be:
Some producer [of Comedy Central's Politically Incorrect] really thought in extremes when they pitted Oliver Stone and Brent Bozell for one episode. I have to say that you were gracious, charming, engaging, and we enjoyed ourselves—except for that moment when I chastised you for claiming you’re an historian. You bristled and denied ever claming that moniker. I cited the source, an interview in some West Coast paper (I can’t recall which one now).
Even though Bozell can’t remember the name of the paper, he somehow managed to re-read the article later and
[i]t turns out that you were right (in the article) and I was wrong.
So Bozell was wrong, Stone never claimed to be an historian, but that doesn’t mean Bozell wasn’t also right:
You are an historian whether you believe it or not. You make films about history and historical figures. You record history, and that makes you an historian.
Now that Bozell, through the cunning use of italics, has transformed Stone into an historian, he can finally slam him good and proper:
Being an historian is not the problem. It’s that you’re a lousy historian.
In short, Stone isn’t what he never claimed to be, but is what Bozell says he is, and a lousy one at that. The evidence:
“Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch,” you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, “You know, I think that he was,” and the audience now cheered and hooted and applauded.
See what I mean when I say you’re a lousy historian?
There are two claims being made here: one, that Nixon thought Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch; two, that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch. Unfortunately for Bozell, Nixon illegally taped every conversation he ever had, and when we consult his conversations with Henry Kissenger on the morning of November 17, 1971 [620a.mp3], we learn that while Nixon didn’t use those exact words—about Reagan, at least, since we know he used that particular phrase about everyone from the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, to the Director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to one of his own White House aides, Tom Charles Huston—he didn’t think too highly of the Gipper’s wits:
(beginning at 1:33:02)
President Nixon: What’s your evaluation or Reagan after meeting him several times now.
Kissinger: Well, I think he’s a—actually I think he’s a pretty decent guy.
President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains?
Kissinger: Well, his brains are negligible. I—
President Nixon: He’s really pretty shallow, Henry.
Kissinger: He’s shallow. He’s got no . . . he’s an actor. He—When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” That’s really an actor’s approach to foreign policy . . .
Admittedly, Kissinger lands the harder blows, but Nixon obviously agrees with him, so we can say with certainty that Nixon thinks Reagan’s “brains are neglible” and that he’s “really pretty shallow.” That’s not quite “dumb son of a bitch,” but it’s close. If only that tape continued . . .
(beginning at 1:46:19)
President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He’s got to know that on defense—doesn’t he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we’ve been at—
Does calling Reagan “a man of limited mental capacity” amount to saying he’s a “dumb son of bitch”? Oliver Stone seems to think so, and I’m inclined to agree. So, as to the first claim, Bozell is clearly the lousy historian here.
As to the second claim—that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch—given that Bozell spends the majority of a letter addressed to Stone trying to prove that Reagan was the second coming of Thomas Aquinas, he’s not well-positioned to argue that Stone doesn’t think Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch.
In other words, the person who misremembered what Stone said in an article somewhere, but doesn’t remember where, who then re-read the article from he-doesn’t-remember-where and promptly forgot where it was again—this person thinks Stone is a lousy historian because he correctly cited Nixon’s sentiments about Reagan and correctly stated that he agreed with Nixon’s assessment. If I were Bozell—and could remember that I was Bozell long enough to cite myself—I wouldn’t be knocking people who don’t claim to be historians for being lousy historians when those same tables could so easily be turned on, say, a “lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher and activist” who fancies himself qualified to judge who is and isn’t “a real [historian].”
(x-posted.)
Whatever one’s overall opinion of Jefferson the man and Jefferson the president, he could write. Here he is at work, with his strikeouts shown in parentheses:
they are permitting their (sovereign) chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our (own) common blood but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to (destroy us) invade and deluge us in blood. (this is too much to be borne even by relations. enough then be it to say, we are now done with them.) these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, & manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren! we must endeavor to forget our former love for them and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. we might have been a (great) free & a (happy) great people together, but a communicat(ed)ion of (happiness) [g]randeur & of (grandeur) freedom it seems is be(neath)low their dignity. (we will climb then the roads to glory & happiness apart) be it so, since they will have it: the road to (glory &) (to) happiness & to glory is open to us too, we will climb it (in a separate state) apart from them & acquiesce in the necessity which (pro) denounces our (everlasting Adieu) eternal separation. (these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, & manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unjust) (unfeeling) (brethren.)
Notice how happiness gets struck, and struck, and finally lands in its spot next to glory. I’m especially taken by the struck sentiment, “this is too much to be borne even by relations”. Nice thought for a holiday weekend.
The appeal process here involves a written document and the option of an appearance with the P&T committee. I think the appearance is much more likely to help than hurt, so I schedule it and hope for the best. It helps that I’ve “engaged in some scholarly activity” over the past semester, so I’ve got new things to talk about. My senior colleagues have reiterated and strengthened their support. I’ve got some outside letters commenting on some recent presentations. I also think my responses to the committee’s claims are pretty convincing, so I feel like I’ve got a little room to breathe.
(In short: as my chair put it, the committee’s reasons seem to rely on the least charitable reading of everything in the dossier. My hope is that the combination of new evidence and an emphasis on what’s positive in the original material will sway a vote or two.)
I’ve heard rumors that the original decision was contentious– it had to be, given the evidence– and I’ve been advised informally that this is a chance to hand ammunition to my allies in the room. So my goal is to present my arguments in brief, then move on to my recent work and future trajectory, all the while making points that can be used by whoever is on my side.
My big hope is to alleviate fears that I’ll be dead weight after tenure. It’s easier because I believe my own case. (The irony here is that I’ve always felt more impeded than encouraged by the looming tenure decision, but this isn’t something I can say.)
On the other hand, I have no idea who thinks what, and I’m aware that the conversation in the room will be informed by previous discussion, so there will be subtexts I can’t understand.
I do my song and dance. The committee argued that p. I argue in my document that not-p. Let me remind you of my arguments. Furthermore, here is additional evidence. We get into questions. Some are broad and treacherous: “why does research matter to you?” Gah. Some details about departmental politics, about mentoring, and so on. I suggest a story about why Unsupportive Guy is that way. For reasons I won’t ever know this seems to prompt some knowing looks, so I expand on that a bit, trying to put the negative letter into context while remaining levelheaded and professional. Some of the members are asking what really sound like softball questions– “it seems like it really matters to you that this manuscript make it into print”– and they give the look of support. I’m suspicious, because I’d picked one of them to be anti-me, but I’ll take what I can get. I sum up some themes of my work and talk about ways of extending my projects into the future. I manage to be clear, for once.
Then we’re done. I spend a long time rehashing, kicking myself for small mistakes. My immediate assessment is that I’ve done myself some good, but I could have done more. Too hard to read the tea leaves. I try not to think about it, with limited success.
Going to graduation is more humiliating than usual. It’s hard being the warning to others. I leave town. Time passes.
More time passes. It’s pretty agonizing.
Because I’m in a different time zone, the provost wakes me up. “Neddy! I’m calling with good news!” There is tenure. Alhumdulillah. I become extraordinarily relaxed. People in several states get loaded in my honor.
Some thoughts:
Gratitude to the committee members, who could have easily dug in their heels. Reversals look embarrassing for them, and I was happily surprised at their willingness to re-examine the question. The appeals process is much less formal than the original run-through; it feels like things are a little improvised. Plus, they don’t owe me anything other than a decision, so it would be easy for them to be stubborn. Also thanks to my senior colleagues for coming through when they didn’t have to. Knowing who your friends are: priceless. Almost as good as knowing who they aren’t.
The down side: if we re-ran this scenario a hundred times, I’m not sure how many times we’d get this outcome. Feels a little…unreliable. Like this. Not sure how right this is.
Some lessons, besides the obvious injunction to publish more. Presenting your case to people outside the discipline is tricky, and it requires spelling out how research in your field works in ways that might feel awkward. Grit the teeth and self-promote. Even your ephemera changes the course of scholarship. Say it.
You never know just how good will comes in handy. My departmental colleagues said nice things about me, of course, but I also got a lot of help from people across campus– people who didn’t have to help. Friends in the know passed on rumors: your case was hard. There was fighting. Press on. It might have had something to do with understanding disciplinary expectations; you should clarify…and so on.
The other thing that helped, oddly, was keeping in mind (to the extent it’s possible) that this doesn’t matter all that much. I told myself and others that this was far from the worst thing to happen to me (true!) and that I’d be fine (true, harder to believe). I got excited about other careers; I started looking for headhunters and talking to administrators about other kinds of work in higher ed. But here’s what’s weird about this: when other people have been denied tenure, I liked to remind myself that they’ll be fine, that losing a job isn’t losing a loved one. But in this scene it’s really hard to stick to that outlook, because so many people see tenure as a life-or-death thing. Being treated as though I’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness encouraged me to see myself that way, and knowing I’d go on the market as damaged goods didn’t make it easier. The lesson, I suppose, is that the academy…what’s a polite word for mindfuck?…is hard to escape. Realizing and expecting this makes the task somewhat easier, I hope.
Ars Technica has a post summarizing Kodak’s decision to end sales of Kodachrome after 74 years because, basically, “not enough people are shooting KODACHROME for us to continue offering it.” In 1935 the film offered casual photographers the ability to take snapshots in color—to indulge that “twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone,” as Don Draper says; it “takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
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This is so awesomely unhinged that it makes me want to drink an entire glass of mercury so I can go along for the ride. Come to think of it, I can skip the mercury; considering all the layers of crazy here will surely drive me mad.
The email starts this way:
Dear Neddy,
I am writing to let you know your tenure decision was negative. I am very sorry to have to let you know this unpleasant outcome.*
Fortunately I’d been told on the phone that morning that results were due out in the afternoon, so I have time to flee campus and head downtown before getting the message. I’d done some work to brace myself for the possibility, but it didn’t seem to do a lot of good. Texting reveals that half the decisions were negative this year. What a mess.
The shame is overwhelming. What will my adviser think? How do I tell my mother? (Yes, in that order.)
I go to the office that night to prep for a class. Some senior colleagues are around. They’ve heard, and they’re being supportive and consoling. Sort of a weird dynamic because I don’t know what their formal assessments were like, but still, appreciated.** The provost is apparently sitting by his computer– we exchange some emails and schedule a meeting for the next morning.
The first night is not so good.
The next morning I get a summary of the committee’s reasoning. Scholarship is the issue, basically. We talk about the appeal procedure. (It’s made to the same committee that makes the original decision, and historically about 10% of appeals are successful.) The provost is as nice and as supportive as possible given the situation. Polite, sympathetic, but not writing any checks his office can’t cash.
I then get to read the internal letters. (That is, the recommendations from the tenured members of my department. External reviews of scholarship will be available when names and identifying information is redacted.) Support, support, support…do not support. There’s always someone, isn’t there? I read the text. Most of it is critical but fair. I think the author misunderstands some of the scholarship in a fairly obvious way, but whatever, that happens. There are also some unnecessary low blows.
I am sitting in a conference room giving the middle finger to a piece of paper.
The second night isn’t so hot either. I take a mental health day. It’s extremely pleasant. The day after, I detect the whiff of pity from other faculty and some students. The department secretary is crying when she hugs me. I hear that another unsuccessful candidate told his classes about all the results, not just his. We’re all suffering and this is a time for interpretive charity, but this strikes me as dickish. I hate being pitied.
I am now a memento mori.
I’m amused by who’s nice and who isn’t, once it looks like I’m a lost cause. Some interesting surprises in both directions. My newfound power to spread gloom by my very presence pleases me.
A few days later I’m able to see the external letters. I had been dreading this. (Over the summer I assembled a list of people in my area who are competent to assess my work. I was then in the grips of despair and didn’t put a whole lot of thought into things, so I’d worried that I’d be screwed by my own carelessness.) My chair has seen the letters and describes them as “more positive than I expected, given the outcome.” They are indeed positive. It’s a genre rife with inflated claims, but still, these are good. “Really top-notch” and “no reservations at all about recommending tenure” and “strongly support” and things like that. My supportive colleagues intend to be more supportive after reading them. They have another letter in the works.
There’s a first glimmer of hope.
I get to work on the appeal document. The more I write, the more I think I have a case. (I do this with referee reports and comments too– my first thought is that I’m screwed, and then I think about things and realize it’s not as bad as I thought.) I circulate things to colleagues in and out of the department, collect feedback, revise. I meet with faculty who won on appeal. I keep my ear to the ground for rumors. I am deeply grateful to the people who are watching out for me, both here and elsewhere. I get advice from old mentors, but I also get a call, just to make sure I’m doing all right. “These things can mess with your head, and I just wanted you to know that all of us here think really highly of you.” He pretends not to notice that I’m choking up a bit.
In the meantime I have to give a talk. My hosts are gracious and seem willing to forgive the fact that my head is lodged deeply up my own ass.
I’m mainly sticking to my vow to be decent about this. No raging, no childish stuff in public. (Except for liveblogging!) The high road is free, and I’m aware that this is my own damn fault. I should have made it easy for the committee, and I didn’t, so I’ve done it to myself.
My plan is to think mostly about the appeal until it’s over, then turn in earnest to the task of finding another job. I have a rough outline of a strategy: try the academic market in the fall. It’s going to be a brutal year, but I have some nice publications and a “record of teaching success.” If nothing happens there, look for applied-ethics possibilities– maybe medical ethics sorts of things. If not, more distantly related work in other fields. A friend says that I’d find something in Big Pharma. I keep reminding myself that I’m a white man with a lot of degrees. I will not starve. I will lose my house, I will have to move, but I will not starve. Of course I don’t believe it, but I do my best to pretend.
The appeal document is polished and buffed to a high gloss. I have the feeling that I’ve done the best I can for myself. I hand the thing in to the Provost’s office. Meanwhile, the stack of grading has grown to soul-crushing proportions. On the other hand– whatcha gonna do, fire me? I enjoy the liberation of the damned.
Next up: I meet with the committee.
*It was sent months ago, and rereading it now still feels like a punch in the gut.
** Here the P&T decisions are made by a committee constituted by faculty outside the candidate’s department; senior colleagues from the dept individually recommend a result but do not vote as a body. In cases of negative decisions the candidate is entitled to read internal letters and redacted copies of external reviews of scholarship.
Journalism is famously the “first rough draft of history” and today I want to look for a moment at what kind of draft it is. To do so, I’ve taken a relatively short article from the New York Times of June 30, 1900, and read it closely. How well does an article written in the heat of the moment stand up for the long term?
The short answer: not well. The long answer, however, is that it is interesting to analyze how the article was constructed, what agendas were served, and where inaccurate or shaded information served some purpose other than simply reporting. As a factual account of events prior to June 30, 1900, the article failed. As a source for a history of that period, the article seems to me eminently useful.
Before we explore those answers further, let me lay out a bit of the background to the article. Since early June, 1900, the crisis in China had grown enormously. Early in the month, the western powers sent several hundred guards–soldiers, marines, and sailors–up to the foreign embassies in Beijing to protect them from the Boxers. Within a few days of that arrival, the train and telegraph lines from Beijing were cut, and almost all communication with the capital was lost. The naval forces assembled off the coast at Dagu in the Yellow Sea put together a scratch force of whatever fighting men they had available, led by Admiral Edward Seymour took the train north from Tianjin, close to Dagu, in hopes of being able to repair breaks in the line and make it quickly to Beijing. They failed, and had to fight their way back to Tianjin, reaching it in late June.
Adam Serwer complains today of the administration’s approach to LGBT issues,
In 1955, the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation to commence with “all deliberate speed.” Lately, it seems like the Obama administration has been moving in slow motion.
But that’s kind of what “all deliberate speed” means. Warren had originally written “at the earliest practicable date”. But Frankfurter urged him, successfully, to change it.
‘with all deliberate speed’ conveys more effectively the process of time for the effectuation of our decision…. I think it is highly desirable to educate public opinion—the parties themselves and the general public—to an understanding that we are at the beginning of a process of enforcement and not concluding it…. as … the phrase ‘with all deliberate speed’ … [is] calculated to do.
So, disappointing though the administration’s policies may be, they’re actually quite consonant with the Court’s directive to move forward with “all deliberate speed.”
You’ll sometimes hear historians bemoaning the state of professional scholarship, saying there’s nothing interesting in the new issues of our journals and everyone’s fixated on trivia to the exclusion of important questions. And I like a good jeremiad as well as anyone. But I thought I’d begin a series of posts on journal articles that are interesting and nontrivial. (We’ll see how long it lasts.)
THE ARTICLE
Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265-288.
Link here, for those who can access it.
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(by request.)
As all actual, practicing literary critics know, few sentences in critical works scream tendentiousness louder than:
What should be transparent to any literary critic is that . . .
Literary matters are only “transparent” when they’re not properly literary. If something is transparent, you don’t need a literary critic to ponder the depths it doesn’t have—any old idiot will suffice. And that’s exactly why Jack Cashill, author of the above and an idiot of long-standing, is just the man to prove that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. For Cashill and his mysterious contributors (”[t]he media punishment that Joe the Plumber received” requires they remain anonymous), the case against Obama is a compelling one:
What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem “Chicago” . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote “Chicago,” and they do so in exactly the same way.
So both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” substituting “hog butcher to the world” for “hog butcher for the world.” This mutual error would be significant (an “A-level match”) if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating:
I have an “A-level match” that proves that Obama’s autobiography was written by a “study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois” when Obama was only six years old. If that somehow fails to convey to the dubious merits of Cashill’s argument, perhaps this will:
Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two “birds of paradise” running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a “yellow dog with a baleful howl.” In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more “howling” than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just Parent], he talks specifically about a “yellow dog.” And he uses the word “baleful” to describe an “eye” in Fugitive Days. For the record, “baleful” means “threatening harm.” I had to look it up.
You did read that right. Cashill did cite as “A-level” evidence the fact that Ayers and Obama used a word he didn’t know, despite his being the Executive Editor of Kansas City’s premier business publication, Ingram’s Magazine; despite his having written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard; despite his having authored five books of non-fiction; and despite the word “baleful” having appeared in print 342 times in the past six months alone. Granted, all those appearances were in high-minded literary publications like Newsday (”[w]ith his baleful countenance, wild hair, sonorous baritone and sage pronouncements”) or leftist rags like The Washington Times (”warn them in baleful tones if they’ve forgotten, say, the Constitution”), so it would be unreasonable to expect Cashill to have been familiar with the word . . . or would be, were it not for the fact that it also appears 19 times in the pages of the American Thinker, the publication for which Cashill penned this tripe. (Seems he can begin his careful literary analysis of the other 848,000 potential ghost writers closer to home.)
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Maira Kalman tackles Jefferson and Monticello. The piece doesn’t change my opinion of Jefferson: terrible president, massive hypocrite, astonishing mind. Nor of Kalman*: national treasure. But it’s well worth the time.
* Are we related? Perhaps distantly? I’d like to think so.
Look at your local paper; for bad reasons I’m looking at USA Today.
And, srsly? Bigger than Iran, Bernanke, and Farrah Fawcett? At least Fawcett did The Burning Bed.
[Editor's Note: When Jacob Remes isn't using his superpowers to fight crime, he toils as a PhD candidate in history at Duke University, where he's writing a dissertation about the Salem Fire and the Halifax explosion. You can find more information here. And if you'd like to write a TDIH, please let me know.]
The workers at Korn Leather Company in Salem, Mass., made embossed patent leather by coating leather with a solution made of scrap celluloid film, alcohol, and amyl-acetate, and then applying steam heat. On this day in 1914, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, something went terribly wrong, and—perhaps not surprisingly given the flammable nature of the work—the whole rickety structure caught fire. Half an hour later, the fire had spread to fifteen more buildings, forcing 300 workers to flee. By 7:00 that evening, the fire crossed into the Point, a tightly packed neighborhood of three- and four-story tenements, filled with the immigrants who worked at Salem’s leather factories and the enormous Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company.
The Salem Evening News reported:
The rush of the flames through the Point district was the wildest of the conflagration, the flames leaping from house to house with incredible rapidity. Police officers and citizens went from house to house in the district when it was seen that it must fall a prey to the flames, warning the occupants to get out and get out as quickly as possible. Soon the streets were thronged with men, women and children, carrying in their arms all they could of their belongings, while wagons, push carts and now and then an automobile were pressed into service in the removal of goods.
The fire burned through the night, and by the time the fire reached the Naumkeag cotton mill, it was too hot; although the factory was equipped with modern devices to stop fires, it burned down, leaving 3,000 people without jobs. All told, the fire destroyed 3,150 houses and 50 factories and left 18,380 individuals homeless, jobless, or both. Of these people, nearly half were French-Canadian, the group that dominated the Point. “St. Joseph’s structure is not only destroyed, but the whole parish has been scattered to the winds,” the Salem Evening News wrote that week of the neighborhood’s French-Canadian parish. Many camped for weeks at nearby Forest River Park, under the watchful eye and armed authority of the National Guard.
Fires were endemic to 19th-century industrial cities. Just in the 35 years preceding the Salem Fire, Chicago (1871), Boston (1872), Seattle (1889), St. John’s, Nfld. (1892), Hull and Ottawa (1900), Jacksonville, Fla. (1901), Toronto (1904), Baltimore (1904), and San Francisco (1906), and Chelsea, Mass. (1908), among others, all suffered major conflagrations. But changes in building and firefighting meant that in the twentieth century, large-scale urban fires declined drastically. Automobiles required clear roadways, so the flammable material that used to often sit in streets, blocking fire engines and spreading fires, was gradually removed. Progressive building codes—like one proposed and rejected in Salem in 1910 that would have required noncombustible roofs—and ever-more professionalized fire-fighting helped too. If the Salem Fire was not the last of its kind, it was among the last. That at most six people died in Salem is testament to the strides made in preventing, containing and fighting fires, even when fire departments could not ultimately save property. In 1951, the National Fire Protection Association published a list of major conflagrations in the first half of the twentieth century. After 1914, only one urban fire came close to Salem’s in the number of buildings burned or the estimated dollar amount of damages: a fire in Astoria, Oregon, in 1922 that destroyed 30 city blocks and caused $10 million in damages.
Yet the decline of industrial conflagrations did not, of course, spell the end to urban disasters. Three and a half years after the Salem Fire, a ship explosion destroyed about a quarter of Halifax, N.S., killing around 2,000 people. The Halifax Explosion was an accident, but it heralded the urban destructions of the 20th century. All sides of the Second World War unleashed massive, unprecedented on cities. Geographer Ken Hewitt estimates that strategic bombing destroyed 39% of Germany’s total urban area and an astounding 50% of Japan’s. Neither these statistics nor the equally startling numbers of dead and bombed out (60,595 dead and 750,000 homeless in the U.K., 550,000 and 7,500,000, respectively in Germany, and 500,000 and 8,300,000 in Japan) adequately convey the destruction of families, communities, and institutions that came with these urban destructions. Twentieth century wars, their technology and ideology created a special brand of horror, which made their urban destructions starkly different from the industrial fires of the 19th century. When urban civilians became common targets, cities were made military symbols. It is not for nothing that terrorists have twice targeted the World Trade Center, a symbol of American urban might and culture.
If urban destruction in the 19th century was largely a result of industrial accidents and the destructions of the 20th century were from war, the 21st century may be a period of meteorological and seismological disasters. While there remains scientific disagreement about the effect of climate change on the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, there is mounting evidence that global warming has contributed to a greater proportion of storms being particularly bad. Global warming also contributes to other meteorological disasters, like floods, heat-waves, and droughts. Moreover, the chronic effects of global warming, especially coastal erosion, means that cities are less able to withstand extreme storms and floods. This means that cities will be more susceptible to destruction stemming from events that global warming will not increase, like tsunamis. There is some evidence, too, that even on land seismological disasters will likely become worse this century, since urbanization—especially the growth of shanties and slums in global megacities—leads to more death and destruction when earthquakes strike. As always, the social effects of these “natural” disasters are felt most by the poor, both globally and within developed countries.
. . . BURNING SHIT DOWN, which must be why neither the Los Angeles Times nor Twitter will load. I admit that watching the social media site come into its own in response to an international crisis makes me wonder whether I ought to be a little less cynical of the political power of new media and the political engagement of the online generati—what?
You have got to be kidding me.
Somewhere in Tehran, an Iranian protester’s desperately punching his jerry-rigged mobile device trying to figure out what the fuck happened to Twitter.
Two groups of people are annoyed that the administration collaborated with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney on a question about Iran: seasoned pool reporters invested in the pecking order who believe Pitney jumped the line, and partisan hacks whose concern for Iran disappears the moment an opportunity to denounce the media arrives.
As to the former, they are, to paraphrase Tim Crouse, journalistic Prufrocks who measure their lives in handouts, and Pitney had the audacity to receive more sooner than this collection of easy tools thought prudent. More significant, or at least more revelatory, is the response of those who have spent the past week full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse on the subject of Obama’s refusal to condemn Iran. They pressed Obama to use the word “condemn” itself, because any condemnation that doesn’t sets off their Neville detectors. No mere objection, they argue, no matter how strong, can rise to the level of a condemnation.
Now, in their mad rush to demonstrate the pervasiveness of liberal bias, they ignore the rather obvious symbolism the Obama administration employed here. At a moment in which the Iranian regime is doing its damnedest to prevent information about the situation on the ground from leaking, Obama grants an Iranian dissident the primacy of place in a news conference that will be broadcast the world over. Moreover, he calls attention to the fact that he’s breaking protocol in order to give voice to the very people the Iranian regime wants silenced.
With the whole world watching, Obama took a moment to humiliate Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But because conservatives are compelled to follow their tedious argument of insidious intent to its tendentious conclusion, what should be a story about the regime being humiliated on the world stage becomes yet another media pseudo-scandal.
(x-posted.)
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